--- now or if he's reelected--
10-3-2020
Why is Trump not facing impeachment over COVID-19?
The president’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic is akin to criminal negligence.
Trump's negligence on the coronavirus ought to be the greatest stain on his presidency—and that's saying a lot considering the lengthy list of his cruel deeds, lies, and many potential conflicts of interest and crimes.
If the House of Representatives felt a year ago that Trump's attempt to use his office for political gain by manipulating Ukraine's president was worthy of impeachment, then surely abrogating his responsibility to protect people from a predictable and deadly disease is far worse.
The evidence of his wrongdoing is all out in the open, and the impact of it is far greater as measured in human lives than anything he has done since 2017. Not impeaching him on this issue in essence lets him off the hook for transgressions too vast to be ignored.
According to Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, a president may be impeached for, "those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
Just for starters, Trump lied to the American people about the coronavirus. As commander in chief, he would have known that a pandemic was a serious possibility because the U.S. military knew, and officials briefed him specifically about COVID-19 twice in January.
A month later, Trump admitted in a taped conversation with journalist Bob Woodward that he was aware of how contagious and deadly it was while at the same time telling the public,
"It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear."
He downplayed the disease dozens of times and continues to do so. That is all the evidence investigators need to establish that Trump deliberately lied to the American public about a deadly threat to the nation and he is therefore himself a threat to the people.
But when it came to a slow-moving, deadly and very real threat such as the coronavirus, he did not take serious action beyond self-aggrandizing press briefings. Even those were stopped when reporters rightly questioned him about his lack of action.
There has been no plan now for many months to prevent infections and save lives. Plenty of other nations managed to come up with ways to tackle the disease and succeeded to varying degrees.
Trump undermined the single cheapest, easiest, and most effective tool against the disease: masks.
He deliberately muddied the water on mask-wearing as protection from the disease, repeatedly claiming that it might not help while alternately saying he didn't have a problem with wearing one.
The whims of a single madman at the helm of the nation weakened the best protection for the public from the coronavirus ahead of a safe and effective vaccine being made available.
Trump's White House opposed government spending on testing and tracing for the American public.
Laying out Trump's criminal negligence of the pandemic is an easy exercise. He has numbed the American people so much to his bluster, rapid-fire lies, gaslighting, unethical deeds and corruption, that we are giving him a pass on the mass deaths he has helped to cause by simply relying on an election to oust him.
Just because we are fatigued by his endless criminality does not mean that the ever-increasing death toll from the disease ought to be swept under the rug. The staggering crime is not even over—it continues through to today and racks up more victims daily.
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